On July 24 2010 04:03 travis wrote: I've always felt like pc gamers were just more hardcore than console gamers in general. Console gamers sit on their couch and eat potato chips and drink beer. PC gamers sit right in front of their monitor and don't move for 12 hours and tweak their drivers and game settings and pee into bottles.
will never lead to anything. ofc the console guys wont say "yeah you are right! we suck and play stupid super easy games!". but evryone knows it. consoles are great for arcades,jumpnruns and fighters. but well.. we can do that too with a controller and a emulator ^_^v
consoles brought the fps genre down and instead of having fun fast shooting action we sit behind walls,cars and piles of shit for hours with some shooting range like "action" inbetween. oh ya and ofc flashy scripted explosions evrywhere. but we dont have anything to do with that cause we are chillin in a safe building lookin out the window.
id kill for a new oldschool doom game with rooms where you just fight against a super giant cyborg mutant with rocketlauncher arms and weird lookin monsters flooding in just to get massacred by your manly arsenal of annihilation.
just to add my stupid analogy:
skateboarder johnboy kidface wears stupid clownshoes and uses a small 5$ plastic "skateboard". but he wins his "clownshoe+plastic board do a kickflip!" competition since he can almost do a kickflip with it despite the crappy stuff he uses!
skateboarder max power mcawesome uses normal shoes and a normal quality deck. but he can do all tricks known to man.
To say using thumb sticks to aim takes skill out of aiming in a FPS is just ignorant.
Despite being a predominately PC player, my favorite ever competitive FPS is halo 1 on xbox. People who say there is no depth to any console FPSs really do not know what they are talking about (or missing out on).
Halo 1 on xbox has a ridiculous skill cap when it comes to aiming, even the best of the best can't get near it. You wont find anyone "hard to distinguish from from an aim bot" on halo, and believe me, it is not for lack of skill. Thumb stick aiming still has the possibility of those same aim bot-ish snap shots, but they are much harder. You push thumb stick in exactly the correct direction and pull the trigger at the exact right time as the cross hair passes over the target. Like someone mentioned earlier, its like the difference between 0.50secs and 0.49secs, especially when playing on a high sensitivity, which most competitive players do.
Compared to halo, quake/ut/ect are definatly visibly faster. Small player models dart there way around the map at high speeds, yet skilled players manage to aim at them. Its not easy but its doable. Halo has big player models with slow acceleration, yet it is still hard to aim. Again, its doable, but hard. So if we say for the sake of argument that physical aiming skill is exactly even between halo vs q3, then the fast speed makes for a more deep and skillful game right? um... well... why?
Have you ever considered that the reason q3-esc games are at such blistering visible speeds is because they have to be? This is because, relatively speaking, the mouse is so easy to aim with. You have to make it hard somehow, so you make everyone small and fast.
Halo doesn't have this constraint. It has slower, bigger players, which opens up possibilities for different game play mechanics. For example melee attacks are a fundamental part of halo combat. Even though generally melees will make up a minority of your kills there is a lot to be said for the threat of a melee attack, which is how they manage to be a core element of gameplay. It's really hard to explain unless you already play halo and know what I'm talking about. This game mechanic just doesn't work that well with fast move speed and high acceleration (and i wish developers would stop trying to shoe horn it into FPS it doesn't belong)
Grenades are an even more fundamental part of halo. Grenades define halo, they are what give combat in halo its flavor and depth. I couldn't possibly hope to explain all the intricacies of halo grenades here if you don't already know, but they are all about predicting the opponent, denying areas, and forcing movements. Again these game elements don't work with faster, twitchier movement (not that developers haven't tried.)
So even though halo might look slower than q3, there is plenty going on. Particularly in competitive matches you have to make non stop split second decisions.
Of course underlying all this is still shooting and aiming. You always have the opportunity in halo to bust out a few good shots and win from a disadvantages position, and i think this is key element of any good competitive FPS.
However add a mouse to halo and you completely break it. That opportunity to win by a few good shots becomes the bread and butter of the game rather than a trump card, and all of the depth that comes from the other aspects of the game melts away. Compared to playing halo on xbox, playing halo on PC feels bad, and i do come from a PC FPS background. The only thing that saves halo PC from being terrible is actually the lag in online play. Compensating for the lag provides a challenge to the otherwise too easy to aim guns, but really, halo 1 was not balanced for a mouse (or online play really).
The point I'm trying to make is that using a console for a competitive FPS is very doable. Aiming is natively more difficult, but this can be a good thing that allows for different game mechanics than are balance-able with a mouse. However the game absolutely has to be build from the ground up to take advantage of this; i can not think of one example of an FPS built for both PC and console that was better on console.
The point I'm trying to make is that using a console for a competitive FPS is very doable. Aiming is natively more difficult, but this can be a good thing that allows for different game mechanics than are balance-able with a mouse. However the game absolutely has to be build from the ground up to take advantage of this; i can not think of one example of an FPS built for both PC and console that was better on console.
What? MW1/2 are both console shooters ported to PC, and its felt in the mouse mechanics. Bioshock may not be competitive, but it's another console shooter that happens to be on PC. There, the mouse mechanics are simply atrocious.
And I really don't think we're talking about the same degree of quickness and snapshot here. I've watched Halo frag movies and they really don't compare. The freedom of the mouse also allows you to be more aggressive, because the snap shots are easier to hit.
Everything you just described goes on in Q3 and CS. If you treat Q3 like a mindless shooter and have the best aim/movement in the world, you'll still get destroyed. Players like Cooller slowed the game down many years ago to give themselves the highest % of success in each altercation and better map control. It just happens to be that today, players are so good that they can still do those things while traveling at extremely fast speeds. It's not a coincidence that powerups are usually refreshed within a second or two after popping. This is a fundamental aspect of map control. A similar shift and later readjustment happened in CS.
The vo0 video just happens to be him playing regular CPMA which is why he can run around like that.
The point I'm trying to make is that using a console for a competitive FPS is very doable. Aiming is natively more difficult, but this can be a good thing that allows for different game mechanics than are balance-able with a mouse. However the game absolutely has to be build from the ground up to take advantage of this; i can not think of one example of an FPS built for both PC and console that was better on console.
What? MW1/2 are both console shooters ported to PC, and its felt in the mouse mechanics. Bioshock may not be competitive, but it's another console shooter that happens to be on PC. There, the mouse mechanics are simply atrocious.
And I really don't think we're talking about the same degree of quickness and snapshot here. I've watched Halo frag movies and they really don't compare. The freedom of the mouse also allows you to be more aggressive, because the snap shots are easier to hit.
Everything you just described goes on in Q3 and CS. If you treat Q3 like a mindless shooter and have the best aim/movement in the world, you'll still get destroyed. Players like Cooller slowed the game down many years ago to give themselves the highest % of success in each altercation and better map control. It just happens to be that today, players are so good that they can still do those things while traveling at extremely fast speeds. It's not a coincidence that powerups are usually refreshed within a second or two after popping. This is a fundamental aspect of map control. A similar shift and later readjustment happened in CS.
The vo0 video just happens to be him playing regular CPMA which is why he can run around like that.
Uh watching movies of a game gives you absolutely 0 perspective if you've never played it. You simply don't understand what's going on. You probably have friends that could watch SC and say "wow this is slow and boring it doesn't compare to (insert game)" because they don't understand what the players are doing. I watch and play SC a fair bit and I still read the TL writeups after the fact because I miss out on things.
He wrote an entire post about how halo 1 is NOT the same degree of quickness and snapshot but it works because the game was designed around the controller and your inability to be that quick which makes it work - and your response is 'but it's not as quick'? All you need to say is, "I prefer the faster, mouse controlled PC games style."
Nobody says "Basketball > Soccer cuz duh hands are easier to use than feet". They're 2 different games and it is personal preference which one you enjoy more.
I prefer badminton over football. I guess they're pretty equal sports.
Saying it's just personal preference is the easy way out. They're both first person shooters, and they share all the same basic rules. The differences are the control schemes, and then the way the engine is built around the control schemes.
On July 26 2010 04:58 Jibba wrote: I prefer badminton over football. I guess they're pretty equal sports.
Saying it's just personal preference is the easy way out. They're both first person shooters, and they share all the same basic rules. The differences are the control schemes, and then the way the engine is built around the control schemes.
Have you played Halo 1 for PC and Console? It's much, much better with a controller as it was designed around it, just as playing CS or L4D on a console is an absolute nightmare. As you say, the engine for console games is built around the controller just like soccer's rules are designed around the feet. At the end of the day, basketball and soccer are both team sports where you put a ball in a net, just like an FPS is a game where you run around and shoot stuff.
Yes, I did play both. Halo 1 was a mess on PC (aside from the fact that FPS was totally fucked up without console commands) because of how easy pistol kills were. Of course it was a problem on console as well, just not as bad.
Like I said before, it's a performance ceiling. You could connect a kb/mouse to Halo and break the game. You can't simply mesh basketball and football like that. The same way racing on a keyboard is absurdly inferior to using a wheel controller.
On July 26 2010 05:13 Jibba wrote: Yes, I did play both. Halo 1 was a mess on PC (aside from the fact that FPS was totally fucked up without console commands) because of how easy pistol kills were. Of course it was a problem on console as well, just not as bad.
Like I said before, it's a performance ceiling. You could connect a kb/mouse to Halo and break the game. You can't simply mesh basketball and football like that.
Ok, but there's also a performance ceiling in sports. The foot's limitations with a ball are not all that dissimilar from the limitations of a controller. Yet nobody claims that soccer is not a great game just because you can't control the ball as precisely as you can in basketball or because it's a slower paced game. They both are great, competitive games. I don't understand why people can't admit that console shooters can be great and competitive as well.
Console and PC shooters are not mutually exclusive, both can exist. I think the problem most people have are half-assed ports that end up being atrocious when they're played on the system they weren't designed for.
On July 26 2010 04:13 Manit0u wrote: My question is: Why would you play Halo 1 on X-Box when you can play it on a PC (without emulators)?
Not everyone had a supercomputer when halo first came out. Its different today, I have a shitty computer in my house capable of running halo 1 on low-mid settings perfectly. Consoles were/are more convenient.
On July 26 2010 04:13 Manit0u wrote: My question is: Why would you play Halo 1 on X-Box when you can play it on a PC (without emulators)?
Not everyone had a supercomputer when halo first came out. Its different today, I have a shitty computer in my house capable of running halo 1 on low-mid settings perfectly. Consoles were/are more convenient.
It's actually more of a problem with Bungie (or whoever ported it) default set up. Most people could get 60 fps easily, but there was a console command you had to use.
On July 26 2010 04:23 Jibba wrote: What? MW1/2 are both console shooters ported to PC, and its felt in the mouse mechanics. Bioshock may not be competitive, but it's another console shooter that happens to be on PC. There, the mouse mechanics are simply atrocious.
I've never really been into MW1 or 2 but I've only played them briefly on PC. It's hard to judge how good an FPS is with out trying to get good at it, but MW to me seemed to me to be CS-ish, and CS just does it that flavor of FPS better. This is a type of FPS that is better with a mouse though, so why do you say MW worce with a mouse? Also i thought that MW and Bioshock were build for console and PC simultaneously.
On July 26 2010 04:23 Jibba wrote: And I really don't think we're talking about the same degree of quickness and snapshot here. I've watched Halo frag movies and they really don't compare. The freedom of the mouse also allows you to be more aggressive, because the snap shots are easier to hit.
Yeh, there defiantly not as quick. 'Snap shot' is defiantly a mouse thing. On console a better name for them is 'swipe shots', and they are generally over a much smaller distance of the screen. The main FPS i play atm is CS:S, mainly scoutzknivez (both 800 and 280) im a bit of a bhop fiend but I've pulled off more than my fair share of nasty snap shots in my time, so i know what your talking about. Also on console there is also a lot to be said for 'setting up' these type of shots, generally it takes more than just having the opponent on your screen like with a mouse. It's hard to explain with out going into a lot of detail though.
On July 26 2010 04:23 Jibba wrote: Everything you just described goes on in Q3 and CS. If you treat Q3 like a mindless shooter and have the best aim/movement in the world, you'll still get destroyed. Players like Cooller slowed the game down many years ago to give themselves the highest % of success in each altercation and better map control. It just happens to be that today, players are so good that they can still do those things while traveling at extremely fast speeds. It's not a coincidence that powerups are usually refreshed within a second or two after popping. This is a fundamental aspect of map control. A similar shift and later readjustment happened in CS.
The thing is, i actually didn't describe anything that goes on in halo. When i said this...
I couldn't possibly hope to explain all the intricacies of halo grenades here if you don't already know, but they are all about predicting the opponent, denying areas, and forcing movements. Again these game elements don't work with faster, twitchier movement
... i didn't mean to say that prediction, denying and forcing aren't in faster FPSs, just that these elements are only achievable with grenades at the speed of halo. And the speed of halo is only balance-able for competitive play because its on console. There are plenty of other way these type of elements exist in halo game play too, but grenades would not be one of them if it had the faster, twitchier movement required for a mouse.
Controlling powerup (and powerweapon) spawns is actually a big part of halo too. Powerups all spawned on a global timer regardless of when they were picked up, so all players knew when a powerup was about to spawn regardless of what has happened previously in the game. Both teams played with some type of timer in competitive games. We generally used an MP3 that announced what was spawning when, played loud enough for both teams to hear it at my LANs. It required map awareness/control to take/deny powerups. Also because the powerup times were all multiples of 30secs, they would go kinda in and out of phase. Some times just one thing was spawning and both teams could converge to fight for it, but sometimes multiple things spawned at once in different corners of the map, and this created a really nice dynamic. "Do we split up as a team to try and take multiple powerups and risk getting none? or do we stick together and fight for the best one?" Any competitive FPS veteran would immediately understand how much map control and awareness would factor into this type of game play element.
On July 26 2010 04:23 Jibba wrote: The vo0 video just happens to be him playing regular CPMA which is why he can run around like that.
For the record the halo video posted at start of the thread is a terrible representation too. It's on blood gulch, one of the biggest and open maps in the entire halo series. (and he was playing 1v1 snipers). Though terrible terrible fun for messing around with vehicles and noobs at a LAN, it is not a competitive map. When i think of halo i think of small technical indoor maps. Also it was halo PC. I dunno why halo PC players were so obsessed with snipers only on blood gulch... such a bland game type.
Also that GOW2 video from the same post is just dumb. The guy who posted that must have trawled youtube looking for the worse representation he could find. The people in the video were obviously messing around, or it was the first time they had ever played. I've only ever played/got good at GOW1, but from what i've seen GOW2 is very similar. GOW is actually a really deep game, very tactical, though you couldn't tell by watching it. It didn't think 3PSs were a good genre for competitive play, or a good genre at all until i played that game, not that i had played much of them. It is the only game I've ever played that had a cover system i liked.
Now that view of slower more tactical movements being needed to make a console FPS work makes me think if a highly realistic, Ghost Recon type of game were to have that granularity of control to make full one-shot, one-kill realism FPS enjoyable. Somehow, the PC versions could still have you being incredibly deliberate and slow at times.
Console FPSs don't need to have slower movement, its just they can get away with it with out making aiming too easy.
I played the origonal ghost recon when it first came out on PC, quite an interesting game. It strikes me as being as much a simulator as it is a FPS. Only played multiplayer in 1v1s over LAN. You can set it so you can have a group of AI you can swap between like in single player. Lots of fun.
I haven't played ghost recon on console, but i don't see why it wouldn't work. The focus of it is not on aiming like most FPS. Its more about spotting the enemy and/or making flanks.
On July 24 2010 04:04 FragKrag wrote: Sometimes the controls may be optimized for console play so much as well. I remember trying to play Dead Space on PC and the game was very awkward and sluggish for some reason :/
could be just a bad pc port, saints row 2 (and gta 4 i think) simply have awful pc ports since they dont bother optimizing the fucking engine and making the coding just work poorly on the pc in general.
edit: one thing i do agree heavily with the article though, is that games (for the most part), should be designed with the pc in mind, with them trickling down to consoles afterwards. Pc simply has so much greater potential in terms of both hardware and software that it seems like it would be easier to code for the pc then convert it to work for consoles than the other way around, much like how its soo easy to code for unix (for mac and linux), then convert to windows based systems, versus coding for windows then converting to unix.
Actually, coding for consoles is much easier than for PC. You only have to put in one set resolution/refresh rate and you're making everything under specific hardware configuration and optimize it towards it. What you put as PC potential (it IS potential) - flexibility and wide range of available hardware/software - actually makes coding things harder as you have to take more variables into account.
In my opinion, there are games that are better played on a PC (FPS and strategy games for the most part) and those better played on consoles (arcade style games, fighting games etc.).
Halo series should never even be released for consoles in the first place (but marketing takes precedence I guess, and it wouldn't be such a hit were it released for PC), I tried to play it on a PC and it was rather horrible, constantly felt like I would be under water.
A part of thing I mean when talking about FPS games.
Console:
Overall complexity and the level of dynamics are two completely separate worlds in both cases. In my opinion, the PC FPS games are not only more hardcore, they're just way more dynamic and spectator friendly than the boring and unclear console games.
What the fuck? You take two games of high level competition and compare them to random nobodies on a map that no one ever 1v1'ed in in Halo: CE and make a comparison?
EPT
